Introduction

Hello, and welcome to ihandpan.com! My name is Ibi Malik, and I’ll be your teacher. This course takes you from never having played a handpan to having strong, complete foundations: how to sit with the instrument, your first three sounds, how to read and practise a rhythm, and every chord on your D Kurd. We’ll start with the bare bones of handpan technique and work our way up from the ground. By the end, you’ll have everything you need to keep growing as a handpan player on your own.

This foundation will be critical to your handpan success.

The handpan makes that easy to forget. Strike any note, in any order, and it sounds lovely — there are no wrong notes on a handpan. That’s a gift, and it’s also a trap, because nothing ever forces you to fix your technique. Plenty of people sound pleasant in their first week and sound exactly the same two years later. You absolutely cannot build on weak foundations, especially in music. Later in your studies, you don’t want to stop and think, “Which one is the Tek again?”. You want to be confident that you have the tools you need to play anything that’s put in front of you.

Think of it as a toolbox; if you’re missing the drill, all of the screws are useless.

How the course is laid out #

To make it easier, I’ve split this course into 11 lessons, in four parts:

• Foundations — what the handpan is, how to hold it, and your first two sounds: the ding and the Tek.
• Your first rhythm — how to read a handpan tab, and the Heavy Sa’idi.
• Ornamentation — the Ka, and how to use it to make that rhythm beautiful.
• Putting it together — playing in time with a metronome, the six chords of your D Kurd, and moving between them.

By the end of this course, you should not only know the basic techniques you need to play the handpan well, but you should also be able to play a full, ornamented rhythm across the chords of your instrument, moving from one chord to the next without a gap. That’s no small achievement!

Why a handpan course starts with rhythm #

Before the handpan, I spent years teaching the darbuka, and the Heavy Sa’idi is the rhythm I start almost every darbuka student on. I teach it here too, for a simple reason: almost everything that separates a handpan player from someone noodling on a handpan is rhythm. The handpan’s technique comes from hand drumming — the bounce, the Ka, the strike on bare steel — and a player with a steady rhythm under their hands can put any melody on top of it later. A player without one can’t.

So we’ll build the rhythm first, and then we’ll give it notes.

Don’t skip ahead #

Don’t progress past any lesson until you’ve understood the topic entirely.

For example, Lesson 3 (The Ding) cannot be mastered until Lesson 2 (How to Hold the Handpan) is mastered. The whole course works similarly, and it is critical at this stage not to miss anything. Without these fundamentals, you will struggle significantly later on in your journey. If you have issues with any topics at this stage, don’t worry – keep practising and it will come. Every rhythm in the course has a tab you can play aloud, at any tempo — listen, then play along.

What you need #

A D Kurd handpan with 9 or 10 notes. The whole course is written for that one instrument, so what’s on the page is what’s in your lap. If yours has a tenth note (C5, at the top), you won’t need it for any of the lessons.

How much to practise #

I’ll finish this introduction with a thought. When I was at the beginning of my journey, studying darbuka in London, I asked my teacher how long I should spend practising.

My teacher replied, “About an hour.”

I said, “An hour a week, that’s doable…”

My teacher replied, “I meant an hour a day.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed.

I’ll ask you for less than that. Ten minutes a day is enough to get through this course in two to three months — but I do mean a day. Hands learn by frequency, not by duration, so ten minutes every day will take you much further than an hour on a Sunday.

Let’s get started!